Chapter Text
He couldn't be sure - yet - but everything in him felt as if he died. Maybe it was a very strange feeling, but he was by his twin's side as he died calmly while being a 500 years old, happy asshole.
He got a bit of experience with feeling someone’s state while dying.
So, yeah.
He felt as if he died.
Maybe not for a long time - hopefully. But at least for a moment?
It was something that happens sometimes for mortal men, right? They were much stronger than they seemed to be, so it was possible that their hearts could stop for a moment... But they still managed to return and live even the years longer. He was a healer. He would know such strange facts.
He took a few very very VERY SLOW breaths to calm down the pressure of stress in the back of his mind.
When he had opened his eyes, there was his father's face above him. The older man looked scared, his eyes were wide open and cheeks wet from the tears. He looked miserable.
"Yonya!" Desperate hands hugged him to the way too slim body of his parent. "Yonya, yonya-”
...
If it was reaction of Maglor damn Feanorian, then he felt completely reasonable asking immediately;
"How long have I been dead?"
Maglor started to cry louder, squeezing Elrond so tightly that it almost took his breath away.
"You are alive. And you will stay like this."
"I know that I am alive," he promised, feeling the need to calm the bard down as fast as possible. "My body is fine and my fea is just slightly messed up, but it'll be fine."
He decided to not say /my whole body felt numb and heavy/ or /my whole body is cold like ice/.
He focused on something that made him much more worried.
His voice sounded BAD.
Elrond wasn't used to hearing his own voice, well, cracked. He slowly reached hand to his neck, carefully brushing the soft skin and a scar?
Ah.
"Ah," he repeated out loud slowly. "My fea was destroyed, but now it’s whole again."
Maglor had choked on his tears.
Elrond, honestly, probably wouldn't be able to tell what exactly had happened to him, but his voice was always very tightly bonded with his fea. Probably as for most of the elvenkin, but he was not sure. He never had a chance to check on enough of the elven feas to consider the tests as believable.
Anyway.
His voice and his fea were very bonded, like, one would never be good without the second. When he was sick from mourning after his brother, he became mute for almost twelve years.
Now his voice was cracked, his neck felt unusually stiff, he had a scar on the throat which he didn’t remember to have before, and his fea felt deeply disturbed.
He wasn't sure about the things that had happened and which he had missed, but when they were happening, he was undoubtedly dead.
"Such a smart grandson! As expected from someone being an heir to my house!" Proud, strong voice called. Elrond blinked and tried to look around from the father's embrace, because he NEVER BEFORE heard this one voice.
A man had stood a bit to the left, behind Maglor. He wasn’t a tall elf, but very broad, clearly used to heavy work and war. His face was handsome and sharp with two eyes shiny as if filled with fire. He wasn’t familiar to Elrond, but he WAS familiar to Elrond’s fea, which slowly shivered and grew, as if trying to reach for a man, to find a bond with him as it has a bond with Maglor or Celebrimbor, or Ereinion.
They must be parts of the same family. Elrond felt his fea doing such a thing, trying to reach the distant elves which were somehow related to him. Like Cirdan or Galadriel, or Erestor.
Elves were created to live together, to have families, to be near to themselves.
“Dad?” He asked slowly, squeezing Maglor’s arm to get his attention. “Dad, I am confused. I am worried.”
Maglor, as he was doing it in the past, when he started to try to raise Elrond and Elros more and better than just keeping them under the key, in a room of a fortress, slowly straightened his back. He looked down at Elrond’s face with a worried, but slightly apologetic way.
“I didn’t want to worry you, starlight,” he murmured. “I was just very scared about you.”
Elrond nodded, because he understood. And he would never have against Maglor that Elrond’s death wrecked him.
“I am okay, dad,” he promised, smiling. “You see? I am okay.”
He wasn’t okay. Not really.
His body was stiff and tense, his voice was cracked and his fea was apparently destroyed and put back into a whole thing or something similar. He was almost sure that something in the new shape of his fea was odd. Probably the disturbed parts were lost forever or maybe put in the wrong places. Whoever had the power to put him back into the right shape, this person tried his best, but had no idea how exactly the shape of Elrond should look and work.
Well.
He could fix it or deal with it later.
Probably.
Maglor, probably as an apology, carefully sat down on a bed, where Elrond was, giving him the better sight of everything around. This way he not only found a bit more comfortable position, but took a deeper breath too. He loved to be hugged by Maglor. They lost many hundred years being apart, when his adopted parent was a beach cryptid, wandering through the shores in a neverending depression. Their reconciliation in Eregion was the happiest event of Elrond’s life since the day he befriended Durin. He squeezed his dad’s sleeve just to make sure that the man would not go away too far.
“Elrond,” his father’s voice was so delicate, so weak from crying or screaming, or whatever else. “Meet your grandfather, Feanaro.”
He blinked and looked again at a strong, broad elf who praised him before.
Feanaro.
Dad called him Feanaro. But Feanor, the one who made the silmarils, the one who spoke the cursed oath, the one who left Valinor, the one who abandoned Fingolfin- was dead.
Elrond looked at his dad’s face again, squinting his eyes suspiciously. Then he returned to Feanaro’s one more time.
He was in a room with someone who should be dead.
He himself also should be dead, right?
“Nice to meet you, sire,” he spoke.
Feanaro smiled widely, with a smile shiny with much more teeth than it was natural. Elrond, who knew such a smile from his own reflection in the mirrors of Lindon, felt calmness filling his chest. “I always wanted to meet my grandfather.”
He needed a few days of resting in bed to slowly regain lacking memories and put the story into a proper order.
His dad was by his side most of the time. Feanaro visited once or twice. Elrond wanted to talk with Feanaro face to face, but he didn’t want to risk stressing Maglor.
He waited patiently. He was always better than anyone in the long games. He was better in them than the lords and ladies of Lindon. He was better in them than the damn Galadriel Finarfiniel. He was better in them than the dwarves with their hard, stone-like bodies protecting their soft hearts.
He remained calm, letting Maglor take care of him and fuss around.
His mind was wandering while dad was busy making sure he was clean, warm, fed enough and other parent-child things.
They reconciled in Eregion, because Celebrimbor was about to kill himself with his naivety and Sauron’s greed. They were in Eregion together, it could be called a family intervention with all the best in words elves: Erestor, Ereinion, Elrond and Maglor. They all wanted Celebrimbor to cut his relationship with a damn maia as soon as possible because Celebrimbor seemed to be the only one which didn’t connect a mysterious Aule’s maia and Sauron. This poor, soft hearted bastard survived the first age probably only by accident. Elrond was almost sure that it was the only explanation of Celebrimbor being alive long enough to trust Sauron from all the creatures alive in Middle Earth.
Well, their family intervention apparently made a maia nervous, because whatever Sauron planned before, he decided to change his mind and attack, and steal Celebrimbor as soon as possible.
Their only way away was through the strange, mysterious door which their cousin tried to create. He called them the Void Door. Obviously he had hoped to save his family even if they all stressed him out and then died.
It was - it would be - cute if not that the Valar apparently made Void somehow guarded by magic to not let Melkor and his servants run away.
To not let the maiar run away.
Elrond’s fea didn’t take it well. It was probably the time he died. His fea was destroyed in the Void. By the Void?
And if the Valar wasn't magically interested in helping the Middle Earth again, then the only one who could have the abilities or enough of the wisdom to deal with the powers ruling the world was-
Well-
Not Celebrimbor. Even if Elrond loved his cousin deeply.
He looked up from the face of his dad, who had fallen asleep after a few days of fussing around.
Feanaro peeked in the calm room which was Elrond’s whole world for the past few days.
“Sire,” Elrond slightly leaned his head to the left side. “How did you fix my fea?”
It was not the best possible way to start a conversation, but he believed his grandfather wouldn’t mind.
The older elf's mouth smiled slowly, presenting way too many teeth for the normal person to feel comfortable. Elrond didn’t care. He was the same. Or at least similar.
“Not now,” Feanaro said, looking at Maglor. “But we will talk soon.”
Elrond could wait.